The UK local chapter of OSGeo are bidding to host FOSS4G in the UK in 2013! For those of you that don’t know, the location of the main FOSS4G “meeting of the tribes” conference moves around from continent to continent each year, and 2013 is Europe’s turn. We want to dove-tail the event with the UK’s main annual geospatial conference, AGI Geocommunity, giving developers a great chance to showcase their work to a new audience, and for UK GI people to see all the fantastic work the open source community has been doing.

Our bid team is massively excited about potentially bringing the conference to the UK! We’re blogging the bid process here and currently asking for letters of support from anyone who likes the idea (no financial commitment involved!), and shortly we’ll have a page on the blog for anyone who wants to sign up to help out. If you’re interested in supporting the event, do get in touch either via the comments below or sign up on the OSGeo UK mailing list.

Nottingham might not initially seem like the most glamourous of venues but the facilities are awesome, there’s plenty of accomodation on site, and we hope to offer people some great chances for informal get-togethers, code-sprints, birds-of-a-feather meetings and so on. Not only will be we offering really great packages for anyone who wants to come to both events, but we’re organising some great workshops on the overlap day, and some joint social events to allow people to really get to meet up. The AGI crowd do know how to throw a good party, so it should be fun…

We won’t know the results of the process for another few months yet, and we’re up against a compelling team from Helsinki- so it could go either way. Whatever happens, we hope to see you in Europe in 2013, and hope even more strongly to see you in Nottingham!